In Digital Vertigo, Andrew Keen illuminates today's social media revolution as the most wrenching cultural transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Fusing a fast-paced historical narrative with front-line stories from today's online networking revolution, and critiques of "social" companies like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, Keen argues that this social media transformation is weakening, disorienting, and dividing us rather than establishing the dawn of a new egalitarian and communal age.

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Publisher's Summary

In Digital Vertigo, Andrew Keen illuminates today's social media revolution as the most wrenching cultural transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Fusing a fast-paced historical narrative with front-line stories from today's online networking revolution, and critiques of "social" companies like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, Keen argues that this social media transformation is weakening, disorienting, and dividing us rather than establishing the dawn of a new egalitarian and communal age.

Using Alfred Hitchcock's iconic film Vertigo as a metaphor for the fabric of lies we are being sold, Keen demonstrates the chilling triumph of the digital inspection house in our daily lives. The tragic paradox of life in the social media age, Keen says, is the incompatibility between our internet longings for community and friendship and our equally powerful desire for online individual freedom. By exposing the shallow core of social networks and our increasing captivity to Big Data, Andrew Keen shows us that the more electronically connected we become, the lonelier and less powerful we become too. Digital Vertigo offers a compelling answer to the pervasive digital utilitarianism of our age.

What the Critics Say

"Andrew Keen has found the off switch for Silicon Valley's reality distortion field. With a cold eye and a cutting wit, he reveals the grandiose claims of our new digital plutocrats to be little more than self-serving cant. Digital Vertigo provides a timely and welcome reminder that having substance is more important than being transparent." (Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains)

I am working with social media - and this book has changed my mind about a lot of things. Andrew Keen has a compelling argument why social media is changing society and humanity - and how the extreme transparency is contradictory to what we really need. Privacy is the right to be left alone, we just forgot it along the way.

I have particularly enjoyed Andrew Keen's past writings but was extremely let down by this latest rendition. I often recommend Keen's Cult of the Amateur to people who want to understand the fall of traditional media. However, this last writing seems to be a bit of an ego booster for Keen.

Keen simply likes to hear his own voice. His harsh voice detracted from me being able to enjoy the book. I feel as though every third word out of his mouth was "ubiquitous" and he harped on one single theme throughout the book. Despite having good insight into social media, I feel the audiobook could have been completed in an efficient two hours, as opposed to the eight that this book was.

I will not be coming back for another Andrew Keen book unless someone else is narrating.

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